Israel Matzav

Romney at the Foreign Policy Initiative

Likely Presidential candidate Mitt Romney (pictured) spoke at the Foreign Policy Initiative on Monday. Jennifer Rubin asked what he thought about the Obama administration's relations with Israel. Here's what he had to say:

In the Q and A, I asked him about the state of U.S.-Israeli relations. Romney’s response centered on Iran, indicating some agreement with Bret Stephens’s view that Obama might be pursuing an approach that forces Israel to attack in order to defend itself in the absence of resolute U.S. action. What we need instead, he argued, are “crippling sanctions,” diplomatic moves to Arab states to induce the Palestinians to “stop bugging Israel,” and a willingness to keep talking about “a military option.” He repeated that this is an option we should not be taking off the table. He also argued that we need to begin communicating to Iran and its people that it is “very dangerous” to go down the nuclear-arms path, because we will respond if such a weapon is ever used by Iranian surrogates, not only “to the entity that used it” but also to the entity that supplied it. Iran should, he emphasized, “feel the pain for pursuing a nuclear pathway.”

Someone please tell me that the Republicans are going to get their act together to defeat Obama in the 2012 Presidential election. As unpopular as Obama in, the chaos in the Republican party doesn't put someone like Romney or Huckabee or Palin in a good position to defeat Obama.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:49 PM